To do this, they tapped a company called SafeGraph that provided them with 17 trillion location markers for 10 million smartphones.
The data wasn’t just staggering in sheer quantity. It also appears to be extremely granular. Researchers “used this data to identify individuals' home locations, which they defined as the places people were most often located between the hours of 1 and 4 a.m.,” wrote The Washington Post. [....]
This means SafeGraph is looking at an individual device and tracking where its owner is going throughout their day. A common defense from companies that creepily collect massive amounts of data is that the data is only analyzed in aggregate; for example, Google’s database BigQuery, which allows organizations to upload big data sets and then query them quickly, promises that all its public data sets are “fully anonymized” and “contain no personally-identifying information.” In multiple press releases from SafeGraph’s partners, the company’s location data is referred to as “anonymized,” but in this case they seem to be interpreting the concept of anonymity quite liberally given the specificity of the data.
Most people probably don’t realize that their Thanksgiving habits could end up being scrutinized by strangers.
It’s unclear if users realize that their data is being used this way, but all signs point to no. (SafeGraph and the researchers did not immediately respond to questions.) SafeGraph gets location data from “from numerous smartphone apps,” according to the researchers.

the next time you see a link to a petition or someone raging about this decision being ‘anti-innovation’, remember Greyball. Remember the Metropolitan Police letter [regarding several sexual assaults which Uber didn't report to police]. Remember that this is about holding ULL, as a company, to the same set of standards to which every other mini-cab operator in London already complies. Most of all though remember: it is not about the app.

Excellent network monitor app for Android, comes recommended by @redacted in the ITC Slack. Inserts itself as a VPN to capture traffic, and looks like it should work well. Supports ad blocking using a hosts file.

This is pretty awful -- an accidental, careless and brutal side effect of marketers passing on sensitive info to one another, without respect for their users' privacy:

'I hadn’t realized, however, that when I had entered my information into the pregnancy app, the company would then share it with marketing groups targeting new mothers. Although I logged my miscarriage into the app and stopped using it, that change in status apparently wasn’t passed along. Seven months after my miscarriage, mere weeks before my due date, I came home from work to find a package on my welcome mat. It was a box of baby formula bearing the note: “We may all do it differently, but the joy of parenthood is something we all share.”'

As I’ll explain, messenger apps’ apparent success in fulfilling such a surprising array of tasks does not owe to the triumph of “conversational UI.” What they’ve achieved can be much more instructively framed as an adept exploitation of Silicon Valley phone OS makers’ growing failure to fully serve users’ needs, particularly in other parts of the world. Chat apps have responded by evolving into “meta-platforms.” Many of the platform-like aspects they’ve taken on to plaster over gaps in the OS actually have little to do with the core chat functionality. Not only is “conversational UI” a red herring, but as we look more closely, we’ll even see places where conversational UI has breached its limits and broken down.

I can't commit code at CloudFlare because we use two-factor auth for the VPN (and everything else) and non-Apple apps on my iPhone are asking for my iTunes password. Tried airplane mode and apps simply don't load at all!

That is a _disastrous_ policy choice by Apple. Does this mean Apple can shut down third-party app operation on iOS devices worldwide should they feel like it?

'Authy should have been harder to break. It's an app, like Authenticator, and it never left Davis' phone. But Eve simply reset the app on her phone using a mail.com address and a new confirmation code, again sent by a voice call. A few minutes after 3AM, the Authy account moved under Eve's control.'

'This form is to document the testing that has been done on each app version before submitting to the App Store. For each item, indicate Yes if the testing has been done, Not Applicable if the testing does not apply (eg testing audio for an app that doesn’t play any), or No if the testing has not been done for another reason.'

We shouldn’t think of “the web” as only what renders in web browsers. We should think of the web as anything transmitted using HTTP and HTTPS. Apps and websites are peers, not competitors. They’re all just clients to the same services.

The Royal Irish Academy, the National Museum of Ireland, and The Irish Times are collaborating with the EU Presidency, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Adobe to bring you a gift of A History of Ireland in 100 objects ‘from the people of Ireland to the people of the world’ for St Patrick’s Day. It is available as an interactive app for Apple iPhone and iPad, for most Android tablets and on the Kindle Fire, from our website, as well as associated app stores. You can also experience the book on your computer, smartphone or eReader by clicking on the 'eBook' button below. The gift is free to download until the end of March.

Utilizing an iPhone/Android App known as “Talking Tom Cat”, the tool has been transformed into a new media mouthpiece, addressing very specific particulars of the conflict that are glossed over by international media: alliances between MNLA and Ansar Dine, critiques of hypocrisy of the MUJAO factions, and ousting of corrupt politicians.

'The company, called Silent Circle, will launch later this year, when $20 a month will buy you encrypted email, text messages, phone calls, and videoconferencing in a package that looks to be strong enough to have the NSA seriously worried. Zimmermann says that surveillance by the state and others has increased vastly over the last few years, and privacy improvement are again needed. "At the very least I want people, as part of their right in a free society to be able to communicate securely," he said in a promotional video. "I should be able to whisper in your ear, even if your ear is a thousand miles away." [...] While software can handle most of the work, there still needs to be a small backend of servers to handle traffic. The company surveyed the state of privacy laws around the world and found that the top three choices were Switzerland, Iceland, and Canada, so they went for the one within driving distance.'

software patent shakedown threatens to remove a 4-year-old's only means of verbal expression: 'Maya can speak to us, clearly, for the first time in her life. We are hanging on her every word. We’ve learned that she loves talking about the days of the week, is weirdly interested in the weather, and likes to pretend that her toy princesses are driving the bus to school (sometimes) and to work (other times). This app has not only allowed her to communicate her needs, but her thoughts as well. It’s given us the gift of getting to know our child on a totally different level. I’ve been so busy embracing this new reality and celebrating, that I kind of forgot that there was an ongoing lawsuit, until last Monday. When Speak for Yourself was removed from the iTunes store.'

Yes! short-term weather prediction and dataviz. I've been vaguely considering ideas along these lines recently, but these guys have gone much further. US residents, fund it -- I really hope this gets made and makes it to Ireland...

'Wi-Fi Sync' was rejected from the App Store last May -- and a year later, iOS 5 is released with the same feature. what a coincidence! 'Hughes said Wi-Fi Sync was rejected from the iTunes App Store in May, 2010, one month after he submitted it. He said an iPhone developer relations representative named Steve Rea personally called him prior to sending a formal rejection email to say the app was admirable, but went on to explain there were unspecified security concerns and that it did things not specified in the official iPhone software developers' kit. “They did say that the iPhone engineering team had looked at it and were impressed,” Hughes told El Reg. “They asked for my CV as well.”'

a $4.99 Cydia-installed tweak for jailbroken iPhones -- turn off the 3G radio entirely, switching down to the much more economical 2G radio, when the device is locked or on wifi. This really should be a built-in feature of iOS

document scanner app for the iPhone/Android smartphones; take a photo of a doc, it'll fix geometry, remove shadows, white balance and sharpen appropriately, generate PDFs and image files, and upload to Evernote for OCRing. EUR4.99 though

ouch, nasty allegations. Strikes me that there's a chicken/egg problem: scraping the Dublin Bus website to build a database which you then sell as part of a commercial iPhone app is probably pretty shaky ground to start with